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Turksib. To date the most spectacular achievement under Stalin's plan has been Turksib, a railroad which to Russians is pure romance. Citizens of the U. S. are seeing Turksib—romance and all—in an astonishing film now being distributed by Amkino, the U. S. representative of the Soviet film trust.
Through blistering Turkestan desert, across mighty rivers and on over frozen Siberian steppes Turksib was built by a onetime U. S. "wobbly" and tramp, William ("Wild Bill") Shatoy. Last week Wobbly Shatoy's road was traversed by its first trainload of U. S. tourists.
In Tsarist times to ship Siberian grain to Turkestan by rail would have meant a detour of 2,500 miles via Samara would have been like shipping Massachusetts shoes to Florida via Denver, Col. "But now," cry the Comrades. "Turksib has come!" Proud and exultant are they to see the sluggish Russian Bear, goaded by ruthless Dictator Stalin, thus take "giant strides."
Women. To Manhattan from Moscow, where he had purchased many a fur, returned last week Vice President Murray M. Singer of Fifth Avenue's smart Bergdorf-Goodman shop. Amazed he reported:
"Russian women are so zealously interested in the success of the Soviet Government that they are not interested in what women are wearing in Paris or New York! They live in a different world."
*See William C. White's able, authoritative description of the International in the current (June) Scribner's Magazine, written after two and one-half years at the Institute of Soviet Law in Moscow.
†Usually consisting of some 20 whites and about half as many Negroes from the U. S. who major in Propaganda and minor in Agitation, most of them at the Lenin school in Moscow, where they are paid $35 per month. Eventually they return to the U. S. Communist party, now claiming 12,000 members. Besides the Lenin school, the International operates in Moscow the University of the Struggling Workers of the East, and exclusively for Chinese revolutionaries, the Sun Yat Sen University.